Role Play Fights


The act of fighting within an RPG may be met with confusion by beginning RPers. However, fighting within an RPG isn’t a big deal at all.

First off, you’ll need to decide just how far this match will go. That’ll usually be up to your character, the other character(s), and the situation at hand.

The conventional spar is as friendly as a fight gets. These fights are between friends and acquaintances, usually to better the two character’s fighting abilities, or for a little competition. This is the usual fighting style for tournaments, usually with little or no bloodshed. No blades, no guns, no bows. At most, there would be weak replacements, such as a wooden practice sword, a paintball gun, or a plastic child’s archery kit, respectively.

First blood matches are usually used to settle scores and decide placement in a group. First blood matches tend to be on a more serious side, and are usually planned out, unlike the other types of matches, which will happen as they do. Also, first blood matches, along with death matches, are actually known as types of matches, whereas spars and brawls are less uniform and can involve almost anything. Guns, bows and other long distance equipment tend to not be used as first blood would be more of a test of melee skill than ranged accuracy.

Brawls are fights done usually out of anger, but not to the point of murder (though any type of match could go too far and result in death, even the normally safe spars in a rare casenario. Also, brawls can easily escalate to death matches when pushed to the extent.). One would use any type of weapon they could get their hands on in this kind of match.

Death matches. These are the epic showdowns, the great fights of good vs. evil, the ones you know will affect the world within the RPG for all time. The wooden practice sword mentioned for spars has almost no place in a death match. Iaido matches and showdowns between gunslingers are both examples of death matches. Also, long fights can be death matches, especially with two nearly equal opponents.

Weapons

Weapons are an important part of fights, unless your character’s more of the bare hand kind of guy.


Swords are definitely the most commonly used melee weapons around in RPs, at the time of writing. They’re best for old age RPGs, where the power of the sword isn’t hindered by the guns of the new age, but, due to the fact that RPGs are supposed to be balanced even between gun and sword, and the sheer power of a good sword in melee combat, the sword has become utmostly timeless.

The most common sword types are:

Bastard Sword: A longsword (around 35 in at least) which can be used with one hand or two. Sometimes known as the Hand and a half sword.

Katana: Japanese longsword, often identified as the traditional samurai sword. Tends to identify with Mary Sues because of animé, but if someone says a character is a Mary Sue just for the katana, I say they can go to hell. Never judge a character by their sword.

Ninjaken: Japanse sword used by ninja, often known as the ninjato. It is somewhat similar to the katana, but with differences. Ninjato were straigher and shorter, and sometimes improvised from a wakizachi or cut down katana.

Kodachi: A lesser known sword, but made more popular due to Rurouni Kenshin’s ever sexy Aoshi Shinomori (It's true!). Kodachi are about 60cm long, with a 40cm blade. From what I can tell... some sites say the length is different, and if I get a solid answer, I'll modify the page.

More swords to come.


Guns are among the most used and most powerful ranged weapons. However, unless you’re in an alternate universe, guns before mid-19th century or so were a biiiiig no-no. And even then, the only really good guns were gatling guns. The rest were rather weak, as far as weapons were concerned. Shoot, reload… shoot, reload…. It would be better to run bows and arrows if your character is a ranging character any earlier than mid-19th. However, present day, there’s a wide variety of guns to choose from:

Pistols: Small, normally one handed gun. Very good as either a sidearm or, depending on the gun, a main.

Rifle: Long Range to Semi-Long Range firearm. Used well as a main from a long distance, but some are not good for close combat, depending on the gun.

Submachine Gun: An automatically firing cartridge fed gun. Good for close up matches and great against multiple enemies. Usually used as a main.

Shotgun: A close range gun which fires many small pellets, making it easier to use for inaccurate marksmen. Amazing power as a close combat main, but further away the strength deteriorates.

Bombs.

What did you expect, a list? Bombs usually aren’t good for RPGs, unless you’re fighting against a bunch of opponents that are unimportant side characters that you or someone else made up to fight against. Otherwise, it’s not fair to just kill someone with a grenade (hand-thrown bombs were around 19th century on, as far as I know).

You obviously aren’t restricted to the weapons listed here. Wikipedia.org has various lists that can be found with a simple search. However, remember that if you’re fighting on the fly, you can’t just magically pull a kodachi from your shorts (unless you are magic, and even then, it still can be seen as god moding).

In this situation, you can only use what your character normally has on them, along with what may be in your surroundings. Don’t just find a Beretta lying around randomly on the ground, though, unless you want to lower the RP to the state of stupidity and seem like a god modder. At least have a good reason why the Beretta would be there.

The Fight

So you don’t know how to fight? The key for a fight is description, description, description. Describe how your character’s moving, what direction, who they’re attacking, what weapon they’re using if they haven’t said it before, what kind of strike it is (a left-handed stab? A right-handed, downward slash? A powerful, two-handed, crushing blow sent towards his/her left side?), and anything else you think might be important.

Here’s a short example of a fight scene, in action mode: